RELEASE | “Trump Card”: The President’s Next, Potentially Decisive Move in Contest with Communist China – Ending Wall Street’s Life-support to the CCP with Our Money 

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release
April 9, 2025

CONTACT:
Dede Laugesen
info@PresentDangerChina.org

“Trump Card”: The President’s Next, Potentially Decisive Move in Contest with Communist China – Ending Wall Street’s Life-support to the CCP with Our Money 

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Today, President Trump responded brilliantly to Xi Jinping’s latest throwdown over Communist Chinese predatory trade policies. Far from heeding bipartisan calls from Congress, the U.S. and international business interests and other shills for the CCP urging him to back down on punitive tariffs in the face of escalating CCP retaliation, Mr. Trump doubled down. He increased tariffs on Chinese imports to 124 percent, while delaying and reducing his reciprocal ones on other nations willing to negotiate an end to their unfair restrictions on trade with this country.

In a brilliant essay posted yesterday at AndMagazine.com, Committee on the Present Danger: China member and retired CIA undercover intelligence officer Charles “Sam” Faddis described the devastation already being wrought on the Chinese economy by the Xi regime retaliatory “overreach.” It is no exaggeration to say that more has been done to decouple the U.S. economy from China’s toxic supply chains since Donald Trump declared “Liberation Day” last week than in any similar period since Henry Kissinger’s secret mission to Beijing began hooking us up to them over five decades ago.

As a result, the Chinese Communist Party is currently in extremis. The cumulative effects of underlying rot in its economy wracked by, among other things, the devastating burst of China’s real estate bubble, systemic banking crises and unsustainable local government debt are fostering political chaos greatly exacerbated by unprecedented, self-inflicted, irreversible and catastrophic demographic trends. Now is the time to redouble the pressure on the CCP.

A potentially decisive instrument for doing so can be found in the “America First Investment Policy” (AFIP) unveiled by President Trump in an almost completely unremarked National Security Presidential Memorandum issued on February 21, 2025. It tasks the federal government with restricting “inbound” and “outbound” investment involving foreign adversaries and most especially Communist China.

By executing and enforcing AFIP, Mr. Trump can enormously enhance the impact of his fully-justified tariff measures on the Chinese Communist Party by effectively cutting off its most important source of financial life-support – namely, that provided for far too long by our capital markets in the form of massive funding from mostly unwitting American investors’ pension funds, index funds,401(k) plans and college savings accounts courtesy of primarily calloused and fiduciarily malfeasant U.S. asset managers.

The CCP is counting on its “old friends” on Wall Street to keep such funds coming, however. And, as former Reagan financial warfare expert Roger Robinson warned Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business audience on March 13, four of America’s foremost investment banks – Jamie Dimon’s J.P. Morgan, Brian Moynihan’s Bank of America, Ted Pick’s Morgan Stanley and David Solomon’s Goldman Sachs – are anxious to comply.

Most immediately, they are trying to raise at least $7.7 billion for a giant Chinese electric battery-manufacturer called Contemporary Amperex Technologies Ltd. (CATL). This conglomerate has not only been officially listed by the Defense Department as a “Chinese military company operating in the United States.” It has also been formally charged with exploiting slave labor by the Chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, John Moolenaar, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green and the former Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, now Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

In addition, as CPDC member George Rasley has observed today at CoservativeHQ.com:

To date, we can find no publicly disclosed accounting by CATL’s dealmakers for the risk associated with President Trump’s America First Investment Policy or for the material change in the business environment engendered by the current tariff increases and general uncertainty of the trade relations between Communist China and United States.

To his credit, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has signaled at least twice in less than a month that the Trump administration regards restricting the access of blacklisted and other Chinese corporate bad actors from tapping into our capital markets and private equity funds as among the techniques available for use against the Chinese Communist Party and those seeking to enable its military build-up, surveillance state and other human rights abuses, at the expense of American investors and the national security.

On March 18, 2025, Secretary Bessent told Maria Bartiromo:

“I think it’s up to us to let [American investors] know how their money is being used….[Would] ordinary Americans want…their money…being used to suppress the Uyghurs? Would they like…it… being used for Chinese military activities? Would they like…its being used for Chinese surveillance opportunities? Of course not. So we are going to continue investigating this and where necessary, block it….

We will make sure that our outbound investment doesn’t turn around and get used against us, whether it’s chips, whether it’s our funding. And that funding then could end up in this big buildup that the Chinese are doing of their military. So we’re going to examine everything. President Trump has made it clear that in the America First Order that everything needs to be examined with the relationship with China.

And yesterday, the Secretary responded to a pointed question by Ms. Bartiromo about cutting off such financing in the present, increasingly fraught struggle over trade, declaring:

Everything is on the table. We are putting in process export controls for high-value security-related goods. We are talking about…export capital controls in terms of a blacklist of things – whether pension funds, endowments – investors should not be investing in to fund the Chinese military machine.

The Bottom Line

The Committee on the Present Danger: China welcomes the recognition of the immense help sharply reducing the CCP’s hard currency cash flow could make in the present moment to not merely inducing Xi Jinping to abandon his present belligerence but also ending the practice of underwriting the foremost enemy of our country, the Chinese Communist Party. The CPDC urges President Trump, Secretary Bessent and the rest of the Administration to make both these goals priorities and exploit the America First Investment Policy to the fullest as a means of achieving them.

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CONTACT:  Dede Laugesen, info@PresentDangerChina.org_______
Read More at Committee on the Present Danger: China